When life gives you ice and snow, go out and play

The ice and snow covering Europe and beyond is creating problems for almost everyone. There is a baby elephant in Amsterdam, though, who seems quite thrilled to just play in the white stuff.

If only more people took the elephant’s point of view in Eastern Europe today, where record snow and harsh temperatures have closed schools and clogged public transportation in Serbia and Bosnia and trapped thousands in the region’s remote mountain villages.

Europeans across the continent were continuing to dig out from heavy snow after a week of bitter cold in which the death toll, mostly homeless people, continues to rise into the hundreds, the Associated Press reports:

The big freeze has caused traffic chaos throughout Europe, blocking roads, and shutting down airports from the U.K. to Russia.

But it has also offered opportunities for snowy fun: Ice skaters in the Netherlands were hopeful they could stage a race that hasn’t happened in more than a decade; children in Rome and along the usually temperate Adriatic coast in Croatia frolicked in rare snow; and Bosnians in the capital, Sarajevo, spontaneously organized a winter “Olympics” in which they boarded down main streets and leapt out of windows into deep snow banks.

A lion cub plays with a snowball at the Belgrade Zoo on Feb. 5, 2012, in Serbia, where almost 70,000 people are cut off from their villages and 32 municipalities have declared a state of emergency. (ALEXA STANKOVIC/AFP/Getty Images)

Here is a scene from Overtoom Westzaan en de Gouw in the north of Holland in a video uploaded Feb. 4: